Then why mention it? It added absolutely nothing to the discussions. Same as this post, save that perhaps it'll clue a few people in that "speech is silver, silence is gold."
...given how poorly Netscape has implemented CSS so far -- remember CSS? It was supposed to take the style out of HTML and make it possible to write a single webpage that'd satisfy all browsers, from Lynx on upward? -- I would never and could never blame anyone for giving up and banning it from their site.
It's a real shame that the W3C standards haven't been followed, along with ECMAScript. If the damned browsers would only render absolutely to-spec, then it'd make all webauthor's jobs easier, make all webpages far more cross-platform compatible, support speech- and whatever-based browsers, and so on.
And they'd *STILL* be able to have fancy, stylistic sites. HTML for the content and high-level structure; CSS for the styles. Gahd, that'd be nice.
But, no, Netscape went and balled it up on CSS; Netscape and MSIE both balled it up on HTML; Opera has balled it up on the ECMAScript. Gah.
Er, of course, there are anarchists who envision this utopian world of cooperation between people, and are very down on the idea that some 'right bastards' might use force (violence/DoS) to get their way.
And then there are the anarchists who seem to desire a violent overthrow of government. They're likely to be the 'right bastards' the others are concerned about...
It strikes me that the Internet is the closest thing we have to an anarchy: a lack of centralized control, rule by consensus, and sometimes mob rule.
DoS attacks are the network equivalent to violence. They're intended to "wipe 'em out," as surely as a bullet to the head.
And put in those terms, it's downright scary. What we have are a bunch of self-righteous hoodlums who put their own *OPINION* of what's right and wrong well above the ability of others to continue to exist.
Yah, I'm using hyperbole. It's not really that extreme. No one is likely to die from this.
But the comparisons can be drawn, and perhaps indicate the biggest flaw with anarchic thought. Some right bastard is always gonna be more than willing to go to the extreme, rather than approach a solution from a non-violent direction.
>Anyway, I seriously doubt MS would start >promoting software that would adversely >affect their core business - the Windows OS.
I'd wager that they make more money from MSOffice than MS Windows; and from various support options for their software products than the software itself.
Does anyone have a reference to an actual breakdown of their product profits? What is MS *really* making big bucks on?
Hmmmm. I wonder how many of the people who bellyache about Quake are also people who use a credit card. Especially one with AirMiles. Or who participate in a grocery store discount card program. Or department store discount card program.
All these things track your purchases, providing the store with valuable information about the spending habits of your demographic.
Hopefully, most of you were clued in about what's *really* being done when you use these cards, and made a knowledgeable, active choice when signing up.
[which is, I guess, my point: iD could easily have done some sort of payback-for-information thing. Perhaps those people who said "yes" to releasing the info/letting iD track them would get a bonus level. Just like Safeway gives you a discount when you give them info about your personal spendng habits.]
Strange. I've always placed "geek" as being better than "nerd"...
In my interpretation:
Geeks have broad general knowledge... just enough to be dangerous in almost anything, and enough to actually be quite competent in many areas.
Nerds have deep, specific knowledge... enough to do anything that can be done in their specialty, and not particularly capable of applying that knowledge in other fields.
Geeks obsess over everything techie.
Nerds obsess over one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
You can be a photography geek, an audio geek, a computer geek, a bike geek. A geek that's geeky about one thing is probably geeky about half a dozen completely unrelated other things.
You can be a photography nerd, but it's probably more at the print development stage than the picking a lense stage. You can be an audio nerd, but it's probably more at the building the amp than creating the best sound environment level. You can be a computer nerd, but it's probably more at the writing a one-off specialized integrated database level than the system tweaking level.
There's power in co-opting a negatively-tainted word and turning it into a positive word. Queer and Nigger are both words that are, in the appropriate peer group, used as power words.
Unfortunately, I can't think of other examples. If you can, contribute some; it'll be interesting and maybe enlightening.
My own resume uses "Professional Geek" as one heading. I take pride in the knowledge I have. I think all geeks should.
First thing we need is a slogan as powerful and funny as the "We're queer, we're here and we're going shopping!" one...
It's important to remember that the Canadian government is still well on its way to imposing the asinine 50-cents-for-15-minutes tax on digital recording media.
The supposed rationale is that the tax will make up for the revenue lost by recording artists who have their works pirated. The monies collected are supposed to be distributed to those starving artists.
Unfortunately, the distribution will be based on the artists volume of media sold. The truly starving artists won't receive bugger all, while Celine Dion and Bryan Adams rake in yet more dough.
And never you mind that the tax is indiscriminate. You might never use your CDROM for music; you use it as data backup. You'll be paying the artists tax anyway, unless there's some sort of language that lets "For Data Use"-labelled CDROMs be sold taxless, while "For Music Use"-labelled ones be sold taxed.
Oh, come, now. The flexibility of KDE does *nothing* to excuse the poor UI design that Corel has chosen to saddle newbie users with.
Might as well have made all the window frames flashing in blue and red. 'cause, as you say, they can always go change it.
Nothing would please me so much as to have a few Human Interface Design experts sit down and knock heads over a weekend to design a UI that is consistent, user friendly and efficient.
Enough of this amateur-hour GUI design. We don't settle much for listening to unskilled, untrained people playing music; we don't settle much for looking at untalented people's art; we don't read books written by illiterate hacks -- -- so let's demand more of our GUI designers!
Thinking it a bit more, I've decided a whole lot of people are being suckered by this one.
What these guys are doing is more like the Vancouver, BC, artist who garnered major attention through the art he was going to do.
Which was going to be produced, he claimed, by dropping a concrete block on a rat. The straight-man routine being that the blood splatter would be artistic, but the *REAL* art being his ability to manipulate the media and all the Greenpeace geeks who freaked.
Here at Slashdot, we have a lot of stats geeks, social geeks and philosophy geeks going on about all the flaws and meanings of the work the two Russians have done.
When, really, the art is in their ability to give your brain a bit of a poke.
It's a stunt. It's funny. It isn't particularly deep. Laugh.
The Greenpeace geeks, by the way, bought the rat from the Vancouver artist.
These guys weren't out to do a serious statistical survey and derive deep meaning from the results.
They're artists. And their art, in this case, is a statement about everything BUT (good) art.
I think they make an excellent point on the hazard of buying into groupthink. They're poking fun at most of society, rather like adults poke fun at teenagers who express their unique individualism by all dressing the same.
But most of all, they're having fun. Yanking some chains. Er, in which case, I suppose, you're supposed to be taking it all so seriously.
The most important consideration (beyond security) is whether access to the right to vote will remain open to all.
If voting becomes computerised, will it result in polling station districts becoming larger? Will it become necessary to travel further to make your vote? In Canada (or, at least, in the past two cities I've lived in), one could walk to the nearest poll.
The public must not allow the government to close polling stations. The consequence will be that an already under-represented population will become even less represented.
It is imperative to maintain a long-term perspective. Yes, computerised voting is exciting, and us geeks are in love with the idea... ...but be sure it doesn't harm the ability of others to vote.
Some enterprising company *really* needs to get around to exercising the MiniDisc format.
I want this puppy to plug into a 3.5" bay on my computer as a backup media and as an audio recording media (using Sony's compression or MP3 compression, my choice); I want it to plug into an automobile audio bay to play back my music; I want to use it as a portable walkman-style playback unit; and I want to be able to use it as a backup media through the parallel port on computers that don't have the bay interface.
The car interface doesn't need an amplifier et al; I'll supply my own. It just needs to be a convienent way of plugging in the deck to the system.
The computer bay interface should be high speed, and function just like a normal hard drive (making it compatible with all OSes, I hope).
The parallel port interface should be compatible with Zip's parallel port. Makes it more likely that the target computer already has the necessary software installed.
"most people expect the 'positive' pole of a modal device (positive == 'on' 'yes' 'OK' 'save' 'accept' etc) to be down for vertical switches"
Say What?!?
WTF has "on" ever been "down"? All the light switches I've encountered have been "up"... as well as blenders, starters, stereos and other electrical stuff I recall toggling on.
Microware's OS/9 broke drivers, filesystems and the like out into individual modules that could be loaded/unloaded on the fly, I do believe. It is a wonderful OS -- shame that Microware never aimed for marketing it outside the embedded controller market.
Since office work began, employers have monitored employee performance. Scrooge expected his minions to keep up the pace, or be kicked out the door. Time-motion studies decades ago were used to identify what levels of output the most efficient workers would be able to produce.
This is just a finer resolution of detail. Instead of measuring completed documents, they're measuring sub-units of the document.
It's annoying, but it's no different than previous measures of performance.
The Mind's I spends a story or two talking about the challenges that a brain/body transplant would cause. Well worth reading!
One problem is that the brain is wired to make your particular body work. It'd have no idea how to send the right sort of signals to another body. Life's a bitch when you can't get the heart to pump in co-ordination...
Slashdot Mirror
Then why mention it? It added absolutely nothing to the discussions. Same as this post, save that perhaps it'll clue a few people in that "speech is silver, silence is gold."
...given how poorly Netscape has implemented CSS so far -- remember CSS? It was supposed to take the style out of HTML and make it possible to write a single webpage that'd satisfy all browsers, from Lynx on upward? -- I would never and could never blame anyone for giving up and banning it from their site.
It's a real shame that the W3C standards haven't been followed, along with ECMAScript. If the damned browsers would only render absolutely to-spec, then it'd make all webauthor's jobs easier, make all webpages far more cross-platform compatible, support speech- and whatever-based browsers, and so on.
And they'd *STILL* be able to have fancy, stylistic sites. HTML for the content and high-level structure; CSS for the styles. Gahd, that'd be nice.
But, no, Netscape went and balled it up on CSS; Netscape and MSIE both balled it up on HTML; Opera has balled it up on the ECMAScript. Gah.
Best of the season and the new year to all!
It exists to sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
The more eyeballs, the more dollars revenue.
Facts just scare the audience away.
Adopt this cynical (and realistic) understanding of the news media, and it'll serve you well.
Er, of course, there are anarchists who envision this utopian world of cooperation between people, and are very down on the idea that some 'right bastards' might use force (violence/DoS) to get their way.
And then there are the anarchists who seem to desire a violent overthrow of government. They're likely to be the 'right bastards' the others are concerned about...
It strikes me that the Internet is the closest thing we have to an anarchy: a lack of centralized control, rule by consensus, and sometimes mob rule.
:)
DoS attacks are the network equivalent to violence. They're intended to "wipe 'em out," as surely as a bullet to the head.
And put in those terms, it's downright scary. What we have are a bunch of self-righteous hoodlums who put their own *OPINION* of what's right and wrong well above the ability of others to continue to exist.
Yah, I'm using hyperbole. It's not really that extreme. No one is likely to die from this.
But the comparisons can be drawn, and perhaps indicate the biggest flaw with anarchic thought. Some right bastard is always gonna be more than willing to go to the extreme, rather than approach a solution from a non-violent direction.
Inneresting bit of thought, IMHO, anyway.
>Anyway, I seriously doubt MS would start
>promoting software that would adversely
>affect their core business - the Windows OS.
I'd wager that they make more money from MSOffice than MS Windows; and from various support options for their software products than the software itself.
Does anyone have a reference to an actual breakdown of their product profits? What is MS *really* making big bucks on?
Hmmmm. I wonder how many of the people who bellyache about Quake are also people who use a credit card. Especially one with AirMiles. Or who participate in a grocery store discount card program. Or department store discount card program.
All these things track your purchases, providing the store with valuable information about the spending habits of your demographic.
Hopefully, most of you were clued in about what's *really* being done when you use these cards, and made a knowledgeable, active choice when signing up.
[which is, I guess, my point: iD could easily have done some sort of payback-for-information thing. Perhaps those people who said "yes" to releasing the info/letting iD track them would get a bonus level. Just like Safeway gives you a discount when you give them info about your personal spendng habits.]
Obscure Canadi_a_ns. They're based in Vancouver, BC, not in Quebec.
And obscure only to you, I'm sure. Why flaunt your ignorance?
Strange. I've always placed "geek" as being better than "nerd"...
In my interpretation:
Geeks have broad general knowledge... just enough to be dangerous in almost anything, and enough to actually be quite competent in many areas.
Nerds have deep, specific knowledge... enough to do anything that can be done in their specialty, and not particularly capable of applying that knowledge in other fields.
Geeks obsess over everything techie.
Nerds obsess over one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
You can be a photography geek, an audio geek, a computer geek, a bike geek. A geek that's geeky about one thing is probably geeky about half a dozen completely unrelated other things.
You can be a photography nerd, but it's probably more at the print development stage than the picking a lense stage. You can be an audio nerd, but it's probably more at the building the amp than creating the best sound environment level. You can be a computer nerd, but it's probably more at the writing a one-off specialized integrated database level than the system tweaking level.
Is your interpretation different? Howso?
There's power in co-opting a negatively-tainted word and turning it into a positive word. Queer and Nigger are both words that are, in the appropriate peer group, used as power words.
Unfortunately, I can't think of other examples. If you can, contribute some; it'll be interesting and maybe enlightening.
My own resume uses "Professional Geek" as one heading. I take pride in the knowledge I have. I think all geeks should.
First thing we need is a slogan as powerful and funny as the "We're queer, we're here and we're going shopping!" one...
"We're geeks, we're..." ??
It's important to remember that the Canadian government is still well on its way to imposing the asinine 50-cents-for-15-minutes tax on digital recording media.
The supposed rationale is that the tax will make up for the revenue lost by recording artists who have their works pirated. The monies collected are supposed to be distributed to those starving artists.
Unfortunately, the distribution will be based on the artists volume of media sold. The truly starving artists won't receive bugger all, while Celine Dion and Bryan Adams rake in yet more dough.
And never you mind that the tax is indiscriminate. You might never use your CDROM for music; you use it as data backup. You'll be paying the artists tax anyway, unless there's some sort of language that lets "For Data Use"-labelled CDROMs be sold taxless, while "For Music Use"-labelled ones be sold taxed.
It's a right cockup, in any case, and you can register your protest at http://www.sycorp.com/levyinfo.htm. Please do!
Oh, come, now. The flexibility of KDE does *nothing* to excuse the poor UI design that Corel has chosen to saddle newbie users with.
Might as well have made all the window frames flashing in blue and red. 'cause, as you say, they can always go change it.
Nothing would please me so much as to have a few Human Interface Design experts sit down and knock heads over a weekend to design a UI that is consistent, user friendly and efficient.
Enough of this amateur-hour GUI design. We don't settle much for listening to unskilled, untrained people playing music; we don't settle much for looking at untalented people's art; we don't read books written by illiterate hacks --
-- so let's demand more of our GUI designers!
...I imagine I'll look back on my life and say, damn, that anti-grav stuff sure changed the way the world works.
Just like ye olden folke today can look back and say the same of electronics.
Or summin' like that.
Who is the freaking idiot who designed the user interface for this distribution?
The windows "close" button SHOULD NEVER, EVER BE NEAR OTHER BUTTONS.
Everyone who has ever used Windows has experienced the thrill of wanting to maximize a window and instead hitting the close button.
It's one of the most significant user interface flaws in Windows.
Why the hell would anyone *ever* wish to replicate it?
Gahd. You know, this makes me a little irate...
Thinking it a bit more, I've decided a whole lot of people are being suckered by this one.
What these guys are doing is more like the Vancouver, BC, artist who garnered major attention through the art he was going to do.
Which was going to be produced, he claimed, by dropping a concrete block on a rat. The straight-man routine being that the blood splatter would be artistic, but the *REAL* art being his ability to manipulate the media and all the Greenpeace geeks who freaked.
Here at Slashdot, we have a lot of stats geeks, social geeks and philosophy geeks going on about all the flaws and meanings of the work the two Russians have done.
When, really, the art is in their ability to give your brain a bit of a poke.
It's a stunt. It's funny. It isn't particularly deep. Laugh.
The Greenpeace geeks, by the way, bought the rat from the Vancouver artist.
These guys weren't out to do a serious statistical survey and derive deep meaning from the results.
They're artists. And their art, in this case, is a statement about everything BUT (good) art.
I think they make an excellent point on the hazard of buying into groupthink. They're poking fun at most of society, rather like adults poke fun at teenagers who express their unique individualism by all dressing the same.
But most of all, they're having fun. Yanking some chains. Er, in which case, I suppose, you're supposed to be taking it all so seriously.
Just remember to laugh at yourself as you do so.
Will the madness never end?
(I just gotta get myself in the stock market...)
The most important consideration (beyond security) is whether access to the right to vote will remain open to all.
If voting becomes computerised, will it result in polling station districts becoming larger? Will it become necessary to travel further to make your vote? In Canada (or, at least, in the past two cities I've lived in), one could walk to the nearest poll.
The public must not allow the government to close polling stations. The consequence will be that an already under-represented population will become even less represented.
It is imperative to maintain a long-term perspective. Yes, computerised voting is exciting, and us geeks are in love with the idea...
...but be sure it doesn't harm the ability of others to vote.
Some enterprising company *really* needs to get around to exercising the MiniDisc format.
I want this puppy to plug into a 3.5" bay on my computer as a backup media and as an audio recording media (using Sony's compression or MP3 compression, my choice); I want it to plug into an automobile audio bay to play back my music; I want to use it as a portable walkman-style playback unit; and I want to be able to use it as a backup media through the parallel port on computers that don't have the bay interface.
The car interface doesn't need an amplifier et al; I'll supply my own. It just needs to be a convienent way of plugging in the deck to the system.
The computer bay interface should be high speed, and function just like a normal hard drive (making it compatible with all OSes, I hope).
The parallel port interface should be compatible with Zip's parallel port. Makes it more likely that the target computer already has the necessary software installed.
All in all, it'd be damn sweet.
So register abdefghijklnpqrstuvwxyz.com
"most people expect the 'positive' pole of a modal device (positive == 'on' 'yes' 'OK' 'save' 'accept' etc) to be down for vertical switches"
Say What?!?
WTF has "on" ever been "down"? All the light switches I've encountered have been "up"... as well as blenders, starters, stereos and other electrical stuff I recall toggling on.
Mebbe you're British?
Microware's OS/9 broke drivers, filesystems and the like out into individual modules that could be loaded/unloaded on the fly, I do believe. It is a wonderful OS -- shame that Microware never aimed for marketing it outside the embedded controller market.
Since office work began, employers have monitored employee performance. Scrooge expected his minions to keep up the pace, or be kicked out the door. Time-motion studies decades ago were used to identify what levels of output the most efficient workers would be able to produce.
This is just a finer resolution of detail. Instead of measuring completed documents, they're measuring sub-units of the document.
It's annoying, but it's no different than previous measures of performance.
The Mind's I spends a story or two talking about the challenges that a brain/body transplant would cause. Well worth reading!
One problem is that the brain is wired to make your particular body work. It'd have no idea how to send the right sort of signals to another body. Life's a bitch when you can't get the heart to pump in co-ordination...